She moved about slowly and faced him. The smile on her face was almost mournful. “It is still my most sunburned shoulder,” she repeated, but did not flinch at his heavy grasp.
“Will you?”
“You are a funny boy,” she remarked quietly. It was less trouble to look into his earnest face than she had thought. For a moment or two she forgot his question and busied herself with exploring the lines and furrows and wondering how this young man ever got so gnarled. Then she remembered and answered him.
“I like your poetry very much,” she said. “Very much indeed. It is so like you.... It almost makes me want to cry.... That’s because I’m tired.... But, Richard dear, it is also very, very comic.” He was staring at her with the fiercest of frowns. “Especially when you wrinkle your forehead like that.... You are the most chivalrous man I know. The Wells family are about to go into the mire, and you rush to the rescue with,” the smile on her face grew tender, “with your little Sir Walter Raleigh coat of a five-dollar bill. It is beautiful, Richard dear, and poetic, and just like your generous self, but, alas, it would not work.”
The summer-house was a most public affair. Either from the porch of “Red Jacket” or from the road anyone could have observed every movement. The publicity had its effect, no doubt, but that was not his reason for inaction. The poise of the woman shook his resolution. He did not know that inwardly she was shaken with agitation. In this stage every inexperienced man is deceived. If he had taken her in his arms boldly she would have gone without resistance, even the passing of the Branchport trolley car might not have interfered; but, instead, he talked earnestly of his turbulent desire; and she met him with the sex defence of beautiful calmness.
Then instead of taking him seriously, she twitted him about his individualism and about his philosophy of egoism.
“I’ve thrown that all overboard,” he insisted. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life,” he cried enthusiastically. “You don’t know how I have looked curiously at this woman and at that woman wondering if I were normal like other men, and if here or there was the one who would stir the fires in me. I see now what the trouble was; I was too self-conscious. ‘Happiness to be got must be forgot,’ George Palmer used to tell us. And it has come on when I wasn’t looking for it. But I played the game square. I drifted on and had faith that this life is planned by Intelligence. It’s no hit or miss. It’s as mapped out as a liner’s chart.”
She was stirred by his vehemence and by the sudden note of seriousness which she caught in his speech. If he had chivalrously offered to marry her when she seemed helpless and dependent she would have had none of it. But chivalry does not make a man’s voice shake or cause the tips of his fingers to burn like hot coals as they touch one’s shoulder. She turned eagerly to ask him—for she would make sure.
“When did you know this?”
“To-day at luncheon,” he drove on, “after you left. Walter said that you had told him last night——”